The performance is on YouTube,3 and the man is called Eugene Burger. He is not with us any more, but his name lives on as one of the most powerful magicians who ever walked this planet.
You have probably never heard of him.
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In the underground community of magicians, Eugene Burger has the semi-divine fame of a Greek hero. In this community, masters, apprentices, hobbyists and collectors come together to exchange tips, ideas and routines; they write books, they make videos, they get drunk, they make love, war, or both. The community has its private clubs, like the Magic Castle in California and the Magic Circle in London, and its online forums. It has an unofficial but strict hierarchy, with the professionals on top, and the most revered of them on top of the top. There is no straightforward path to these rarefied realms of arch-wizardry: the community must put you there. Working hard does help, though. You want to be someone in the field of card magic? Then you had better go and study with the legendary Spanish cardician Juan Tamariz. Achieving fame in the wider world, by having your own successful TV show, can help boost your reputation, but only to an extent. Illusion designer Jim Steinmeyer, who is not a performer, is virtually unknown among us laypeople, but has rock-star status among magicians. The respect of your peers is the only currency that matters. To rise up the ranks you need street cred, and you only gain it by word of mouth.
The community has its own classics, printed in small quantities and very hard to find. Magicians are true believers in wonder. They talk of it at every occasion. They cultivate wonder, they cherish it, they passionately argue that awakening a sense of wonder is the point of their craft – and if not the only one, then by far the most important. When a magician is doing his thing, the audience should be amazed, astonished, flummoxed. A famous and articulate Dutch magician adopted the stage name of Tommy Wonder, just in case his audience hadn’t cottoned on. Jim Steinmeyer says that magic properly done gives ‘a redemptive feeling, a reminder of many potential wonders’.4 Wonder is a benign obsession for most magicians, the reason they dedicate their life to a niche, misunderstood and often ridiculed art. They train every day, with mirrors and family members, neglecting to study sensible subjects like law and economics, forgetting to go out with their friends, not bothering with the beach – and all they have to show for their efforts is nimble fingers that can shuffle cards in two dozen ways. They do that because shuffling cards is not the endgame.
A sense of wonder is.
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Even with their extensive international community, magicians are not what they once were. Historically, the magoi, or magi, were ancient Persian priests, followers of the prophet Zoroaster, and custodians of a sacred knowledge of fire.5 They spoke with gods and humans alike, and were endowed with fabulous powers (and it is, of course, from magoi, the Greek word for this strange priestly caste, that our word ‘magic’ ultimately derives). The magoi could make or break empires.
Today they make a living in Las Vegas.
Day in, day out, they step out in front of a hyper-aware public who know that it is all done with smoke and mirrors. These are audiences of the hard-bitten – gamblers, drinkers, high-livers, people who think they have seen it all. It takes hard work, not to mention an immense amount of chutzpah, to perform for these people with a smile and a bow, and then proceed to fool them into wonder.
I was sure that there was a lesson here for me and I took the obvious next step and decided to learn some tricks. As is often the case, the obvious next step proved to be a mistake.
I started by scouring videos online to find performances that struck a chord with me, and selected three. Eugene Burger’s trick with a piece of string; a coin ‘vanish’ you can practise in a sleeveless shirt; and a card routine, one of countless variations on a trick that makes the magician know what card a person will pick, before they pick it. Impressive stuff, powered by very simple methods.
I won’t give away the methods here – you can find them easily if you are so inclined. Suffice to say that they do not require any special prop. You can do the string trick using only pieces of string, the coin vanish using only a coin, and the card routine using only a pack of cards and a piece of paper with a drawing on it of the card your friend will pick.
One early autumn afternoon, I walked into my study with strings, a coin, a deck of cards and a mirror in front of which to practise, and started. In a feel-good movie, this is where the soundtrack would kick in, providing a suitably uplifting accompaniment to my progress towards mastery. In the event, my progress was neither impressively good nor impressively bad. It was violently average. (My soundtrack, if you are interested at all, was Fairport Convention’s What We Did on Our Holidays.) The card trick was foolproof enough for me to learn reasonably easily. The string one was more difficult, the coin vanish even more so.
After two weeks I felt ready for my first road test, and I asked Paola to give me some feedback on my performance. Was it wonderful enough already? I began by messing up the coin trick. Even before I had properly started, Paola noticed me carrying out a move that is necessary for the trick to work – and which the audience is not supposed to spot. I had no good explanation so the whole thing was dead in the water. I moved on to the card routine, which I managed, more or less, but I messed up again with the string, making a clumsy move that revealed the method.
‘You need more practice,’ said Paola, kindly.
I certainly did. The next day I marched into my study with coin and cards and strings and a new resolution. I decided that, for that day at least, it was not practice in the strict sense I needed, but rather, to study some more. I spent my allotted magic hour looking at videos on my computer. The day after that, I carefully selected and bought a new book on magic, which surely held better secrets than the ones I knew.
On the third day, it dawned on me I was never going to practise again. To put it simply, I couldn’t be bothered.
Seeing how my favourite magical effects were achieved gave me a satisfying ‘ah-ha’ moment, but this came from a sense of understanding rather than a sense of wonder. It was still pleasant, and without any doubt still valuable, but not what I was after. Methods were not what I was after. Methods are quintessentially rationaclass="underline" I was chasing something more ancestral than that.
It made sense: the blight of adulthood is that we know too many tricks. I did not need to grasp even more of those. How could I have thought that learning how to create the illusion of a vanishing coin would be inherently more magical than learning how to create the illusion of a monster on the wall? The underlying process was identical. I was simply making myself more disenchanted than ever.
I had to take the opposite path. I was after a form of philosophical judo that would allow me to use the tricks of life to re-enchant my world. What I wanted was to learn how to look at myself with a magician’s eye and use what I knew to fool myself into wonder. I shouldn’t try to be smarter, not in a conventional sense; I had to become a better sucker.
I asked a friend for help.
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Ferdinando Buscema is an internationally renowned Italian magician. His work has been praised by the likes of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who invented the concept of ‘flow’, and Kary Mullis, the Nobel prize-winning biochemist. He has been a friend for many years, after we bonded (I promise I am not making this up) over our shared interest in all things wonderful. He was not surprised to learn that my foray into the magical arts had not borne fruit.